Page:Samuel Fleming, M.B., C.M. - obituary - British Medical Journal - 1926 - 1(38).jpg



, metropolitan police magistrate of Lambeth, died on December 20th, 1925, on board the steamer Armadale Castle, on his way to the Cape. He was born on May 24th, 1865, the son of Mr. Frederick Grant Fleming, and was educated at University College, London, and Edinburgh University, where he graduated M.B., C.M. in 1890; he took the D.P.H. at Cambridge in 1893. Leaving the medical profession for the law, he was called to the Bar by Gray's Inn and the Middle Temple in 1897, and joined the North-Eastern Circuit, practising at the Durham, Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford, and Rotherham sessions. During the war he was legal adviser and judge advocate of the Aldershot Command, afterwards legal adviser to the Army Medical Department, and received a brevet lieutenant-colonelcy in the R.A.M.C. in 1918, having become major in 1916. In 1920 he was appointed Recorder of Doncaster, but resigned that post in the following year, when he was appointed a metropolitan police magistrate. He sat at first at Greenwich and Woolwich, and was transferred to Lambeth in 1924. He had been elected a member of the Bar Council in 1920. In 1892 he married Elizabeth, daughter of the late Colonel W. C. Ball, C.B., and at the time of his death was on his way, with his wife, to visit one of his daughters, who is married to Major Piet Vanderbyl.

Mr. Fleming was, we believe, the first and only medical man who has filled the post of metropolitan police magistrate. In this connexion we may remark that the present generation has seen the creation of the first medical peers, Lord Lister (1897), Lord Ilkeston (1910), Lord Finlay (1916), and Lord Dawson of Penn (1920); the first medical Lord Chancellor, Viscount Finlay (1916-18); the first medical ambassador, Sir Auckland Geddes (1920-24); the first medical Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Crosby (1911); and the first medical Poet Laureate, Dr. Robert Bridges (1913).